Part 5: Operation Sleeping Throne Room

Operation Sleeping Throne Room

I'll preface this with a warning that the JAIDs is coming. I talk about what went wrong a bit in the video, but this video may not be as high quality as previously. As I mentioned FRAPS is now having issues and I used a different recording method with out getting all the settings perfect. The mission portion of the video was recorded in 720p and may be a little lower quality than usual. This is fixed by next video, sorry about that. But like Guava says, it's a Jadestar LP, you're lucky you don't somehow get cancer by watching this.

Retaliation missions are the new Terror missions. They play out almost the same with the same sort of mechanics to worry about. Namely rescuing civilians before they are all murdered by the aliens. There is no hard turn timer like most other missions but a good rule of thumb to keep in mind is that the aliens will kill one civilian as long as there is a alien pod untriggered and roaming around in the shroud. This generally means you have to be quick with things. You can optionally choose to seek out the aliens and deal with them before they can kill all the civilians or you can move out and rescue the civilians yourself and deny the aliens the ability to kill enough of them to cause a mission failure. Retaliation missions can play out very differently from each other solely based on where the civilians are and map lay out. Sometimes you may be able to rescue 6 civilians in short order at the start of the map which will give you a lot of breathing room to take things slower and safer. Sometimes you may barely find any and need to rush forward to either find civilians or find the aliens and stop them first.

A big new wrinkle to the retaliation missions is the new alien unit Faceless. Faceless are huge jerks that are disguised as civilians and will transform when you get too close. On their own they aren't so bad, they only melee attack and for rather low damage. The big problems that come with faceless is when they transform and swipe at you while you are busy dealing with other aliens. Notably their swipe will destroy cover in a small area of effect potentially leaving a wounded soldier exposed and vulnerable for other aliens to pick off. Faceless are the most difficult to deal with early on in the game when soldiers have low health and ballistic weapons may take several shots to drop the 10hp monsters. Once the first armor and weapon upgrades are equipped they become pretty tame. There are ways to detect faceless ahead of time as well, battle scanners and the specialist ability Scanning Protocol will reveal faceless. Lastly any faceless left disguised once all other aliens are killed will drop their disguise and rush at you. This isn't really threatening at the end of the map and is more of a convenience thing rather then having to hunt them down and check every civilian left on the map. So good thinking there Jake.